By Bethanie Harriman – EMTV News, Lae
Lae Businesses employing Papua New Guinea’s say students graduating from higher learning institutions need to be trained according to the jobs available in the PNG economy.
Majestic Seafood General Manager, Wayne Adams, runs a start up business that is part of the chain of tuna manufacturing companies planned for Lae City.
He says the problem stems from the lack of courses designed for jobs available in the economy.
“We are educating a lot of people, that will be educated unemployed people, because we are not educating them to the job that are available,” said Adams.
There are at least five tuna factories going to be built around Lae city in the next six years and they are going to be start up businesses that will need to be supported by a skilled and capable work force made up of Papua New Guinea’s.
The demand may be too much for the PNG Higher education system, because some tuna companies, like Majestic, are already finding it difficult to find the right people for the job.
“You can put a job in the paper for an accountant and you can get twenty people, you can put a job in the paper for a refrigeration Engineer or Mechanic, somebody skilled, and you’d be lucky to get one or two certified and competent people,” said Adams.
Adams isn’t alone, Real Estate Company, the Professionals’ Managing Director, Mike Quinn, who has been in the country longer than Adams says training in TVET institutes need to be improved to world standards.
Quinn says they need to source skilled people offshore to fill in roles in their daily operation.
“We have people that come through the vocational centers and they are doing a reasonable job, but they are not taking the training to the level that we need, so we need to look offshore to get the skill that we need to fix that,” said Mike Quinn.
Employers in Lae and Port Moresby are looking in other countries in the Asia-Pacific region who have honed their education system over the years for skilled workers.
There is a general consensus, that over the last twenty years the quality of education dropped and failed to keep up with the demands.
